Elon Musk Would Like to Visit Mars, Needs to Plan in Case He Dies

Elon Musk says that he would like to personally visit Mars one day, but he needs to make sure that money-grubbing investors wouldn’t change SpaceX’s mission just in case he dies during the flight.

Musk, 45, gave a big presentation on his plans for colonizing Mars at the International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara, Mexico, on Tuesday, and stuck around afterward for a lengthy Q&A session. One man in the crowd wanted to know if Musk himself planned on taking advantage of his company’s ambitious interplanetary designs.

“Are you gonna go to Mars? I would hate to put in all this work and then not go,” the questioner asked.

“I would definitely like to go to orbit and visit space station and ultimately go to Mars,” Musk responded. “I’ve got to make sure that if something goes wrong on the flight and if I die that there’s a good succession plan and that [SpaceX] doesn’t somehow get taken over by investors who just want to maximize the profit of the company not go to Mars. That would be my biggest feat in that situation.”

Musk’s chief concern, it would seem, is that he needs to make sure his company keeps being run the way he would like it to be run in the tragic event that he burns up in space. Don’t ever say the guy isn’t forward-thinking.

The entire Q&A session was full of, shall we say, interesting moments like this, as the crowd was clearly enthusiastic. “On behalf of all the ladies,” another questioner asked slightly earlier in the event, “can I go upstairs and give you a kiss? A good luck kiss?”